Matt Mullenweg, founder, CEO and president of Automattic, talks to Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett about how WordPress—their main product and open source project—is the “dark matter of the Web.” He also tells us what’s up with Tumblr, Openverse, WooCommerce, the Gutenberg block editor, and other projects among the many the company is up to.
I was active in the blogging and CMS world when Matt Mullenweg forked b2 and created WordPress. In fact, I was developing my own blogging/CMS software at the time. So it’s been with great interest and a bit of jealously that I’ve watched Matt become successful, famous, and weathly. I’m old enough now to be fairly philisophical about it, I’m well aware of my own shortcomings and past missteps. But I still find a few things interesting.
- Matt is clearly an intelligent, kind, and well-spoken human, as evidenced in this podcast episode.
- WordPress’ acquisition of various “old” tech and what that indicates about Matt’s ethos and business strategy.
- I’ve tried to use WordPress a number of times over the years, including since they introduced their new editor Gutenberg. I’ve never found it particularly intuitive or easy to set up or use, and that is despite my web host having a turn-key WordPress installation solution.